httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-I-wKdI5Iik
9 Feb 2013
To play, press the icon at the lower left corner of the YouTube window.
To view full-screen, click the icon at the lower right corner of the YouTube window
(then later, press Escape to end full-screen).
Sun rose again today
Sunrise 25 January 2013
I know it’s a bit blurry. So was I.
Purple Finch
at the niger seed feeder
Thanks, Gareth, for the loan of the big lens. Wikipedia has an interesting note about this bird seed, sometimes misnamed thistle: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guizotia_abyssinica
124 Argyle Road
As seen recently on Google Maps from St Stephens Ave:
Built about 1900 maybe, Wena’s birthplace, the Roberts home for sixty years. Not in frame was a renovator’s sign, Project One. Changes since we knew it: the front garden gone for parking of course, with new entrance on St Stephens Ave. Also gone, both the side door to the street (you can just make out the new brickwork where the door with no doorknob used to be). The nearby door in the wall permitting entry to the back garden is also gone. So is Ieuan’s motorbike shed, revealing either an extra window or a new door to the scullery. (And are those two kitchen windows new? Otherwise Ieuan’s shed would have blocked them, and I don’t remember that.) Definitely new since we were there, perhaps replacing the leaky old scullery skylight, is a vaulted skylight perhaps providing light both to the scullery and the dining room, probably a very nice idea. And there’s a new skylight above the back bedroom. Not in frame here, but a rather fuzzy view on Google seems to show an almost derelict garage at the bottom of the back garden, with an entrance from St Stephens Ave. The satellite view of Argyle Road at this point shows the strikingly straight row of perhaps twenty houses, presumably all the same except for this, the only one with a turret (above the master bedroom, which Ieuan said was the coldest, draughtiest room in the house). This house was said to have been kept by the builder for himself. I think Granddad must have bought it on his schoolteacher’s salary about 1920. It sold in 2002 for £700,000.
Fifty years ago
Pics from the Queen Mary just before docking at Pier 90:
Also see Gareth’s animation on his website.
Here’s what we had been doing earlier:
(No direct response to any of those messages has yet arrived. However I did hear that year from a boy in the north of England presenting himself as an officer of the International Bottle Club.) Assuming the four-hour time difference and the coordinates were correct, I certainly got the London time wrong — it would have had to be four hours later, not earlier. And I was mistaken at that point about being in the middle of the Atlantic. We were almost there! Here’s what Google Maps makes of those coordinates today:
Here’s where we’d stayed the night before we sailed from Southampton:
House Lights Up
We replaced the incandescent icicles with LEDs (too many duds and half-lit strings), but miss the warm glow of the old kind and wish these weren’t so blue.
Working the election Nov 6th
We 15 election officials at the Hartwood precinct (in the new assembly hall of the historic Hartwood Presbyterian Church) served 226 voters per hour for 13 hours (6am to 7pm). We had four laptop check-in stations in almost constant use, and one more at the help desk in frequent use for special cases. Two printers issued check-in tickets, exchanged for ballots at our single ballot table. We had 14 ballot booths, one combination scanner/ballot box, and one touch-screen/audio electronic voting machine reserved for just three visually challenged voters. All others voted with Stafford County’s usual paper scan sheet ballot. A few of us did an hour or two of setup the day before. All of us convened on election day by 5am and worked until 9pm. I took paperwork and voting machines to the courthouse after that, and was home and in bed by 10pm. Most of the results below appeared on the website of the state board of elections next morning, although it took a week for the provisional ballot results to appear there. [On November 15th, I inserted below a chart from Google showing national results.] At our precinct eight provisional ballots were collected — none of our voters had to use the specially designated provisional ballots for voters unable to present identification on election day. (Eligibility of provisional voters is evaluated by the electoral board in the days after the election in order to determine whether or not to count their ballots at that point.) We had to replace about 40 spoiled ballots for voters who accidentally voted for more than one choice within a given race. About fifteen handicapped or elderly people were able to vote curbside from their cars — I did five together at one point. Several came early, in front of a hundred others standing in line, but none came in the last few hours at the end of the day. There was no line when we closed the doors at 7pm, at which point there was only one voter left in the room.
Hurricane Sandy
Sandy and I survived Sandy. Lost power from about 9pm to 6am, slept in the basement for fear of the house being blown away (or bashed by the nearest oak tree). Outside things are quite wet and a little battered . . .
. . . but doggone, I need to get out with the chain saw to fix the back fence before the next time the dogs need to go out.
Hurricane Sandy weather statistics from near Heflin Road, a couple of miles from our house:
Dilwyn was here!
October 19th we visited Mount Vernon (but did not take the river cruise), then walked the South Valley Trail in Prince William Forest.
Dilwyn tried to fit in, even wore his half-marathon shirt, but after breakfast had to leave us for a long drive to South Carolina. We went south too. Erin was in Fredericksburg for the annual alumnae game at the University of Mary Washington. She had a ball. They won.
